Sunday, April 22, 2012

Thumbs up for Marine?

I haven't followed the French election closely, but Tiberge at Gallia Watch has been impressed with the performance of the nationalist candidate Marine Le Pen:

She has run an impeccable campaign, wisely designed to appeal to the best in human nature - the love of country, the longing for freedom from fear, the need to feel at home in one's own land, to raise children in safety and prosperity, to speak one's mind freely, the aggressiveness to fight forces both alien and domestic that seek the destruction of the country. She has, we hope, reawakened the self-preservation instinct and squashed the suicidal way-of-least-resistance that the French have been taking for too long.

It seems unlikely that Marine will make it to the run-offs, but she has polled a respectable 15% of the vote. Interestingly, she is more popular with younger than with older voters:

There seems to have been the usual effect of the Nationalist candidate exceeding her polling numbers.

When her father came second, AIR he faced Chirac the centre-right/technocrat Gaullist candidate in the run-off, and the socialists mobilised for Chirac giving him an easy victory. These numbers would seem to raise the possibility that in the future there could be a Socialist vs Nationalist run-off, which could conceivably mean a Nationalist victory.